6/24/2023 0 Comments Ballard concrete island![]() ![]() I don't know, but I will say that this seems of its time and place: "the 60s" about to happen in England with a concomitant interest in both outer and inner space, and the surreal about to become the language of advertising and the Sunday Supplements (five years later, if you made the narrator more of a hunk, this story could be the storyboard for a TV commercial selling aftershave). ![]() Maybe the ocean represents a fully lived sensual life the schoolteacher, in his holiday sandals (worn with socks, no doubt!) and love of fossils (life literally turned to stone) has denied himself. Is it possible that the narrator is the prisoner, and the lizard seen at the end of the story tells us that he's now been trapped in the prehistoric past? And what is the woman, then? A portal as >23 elenchus: suggests? Surrealism is, also, nearly always about sex in some way. although an adult in a position of authority (indeed, a schoolteacher) this narrator is "packed off" on a seaside holiday as if he were a child. If anything, I was reminded of Robert Aickman, with the surrealism and passive narrator. It's that the tone of the story didn't strike me as Lovecraftian. ![]() Obviously there's the Deep Time theme, but you could just as well make an argument for a link to H. I didn't see a strong connection to HPL in this story. ![]()
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